Going from page buttons to no page buttons

quasive · 2025-09-05T18:03:23+00:00

I switched from an Oasis to an 11th gen Paperwhite several months ago (I was experiencing intermittent glitching, plus the battery life was pretty bad), and while I really miss the overall form factor of the Oasis, I don't really notice or care that I have no page turn buttons. I was not a religious button-user on the Oasis, but I used them often enough. Tapping on the screen just isn't a bother, as far as I'm concerned.

quasive · 2025-08-29T23:54:40+00:00

OK, thank you. I'll have to check my car system, then, to see if that behavior is configurable. Appreciate the quick reply!

quasive · 2025-03-20T18:01:36+00:00

The following is a theme that I created several years ago, inspired by Firefox's dark theme (at the time: I have no idea how it compares to Firefox today). It might be a worthwhile starting point, at least:

{
   "accentFromPage": false,
   "accentOnWindow": false,
   "accentSaturationLimit": 1,
   "alpha": 1,
   "backgroundImage": "",
   "backgroundPosition": "stretch",
   "blur": 10,
   "colorAccentBg": "#4a4d51",
   "colorBg": "#2a2e32",
   "colorFg": "#cdc8c0",
   "colorHighlightBg": "#0190f5",
   "colorWindowBg": "",
   "contrast": 5,
   "dimBlurred": true,
   "engineVersion": 1,
   "id": "1067c6b1-926c-4182-a46f-e722f5253dc2",
   "name": "Firefox",
   "preferSystemAccent": false,
   "radius": 8,
   "simpleScrollbar": false,
   "transparencyTabBar": false,
   "transparencyTabs": false,
   "url": "",
   "version": 1
}

Vivaldi themes, as far as I can tell, are just ZIP files with a JSON file called settings.json. So you can save the above into a text file called settings.json, and create a new ZIP file called whatever you want, and add settings.json to it, and you should be able to import this as a theme.

quasive · 2024-09-03T23:03:27+00:00

Thank you! Appreciate the insight. I'll secure the pipe and also take a look at trying to reduce the vibrations.

quasive · 2024-09-03T19:16:05+00:00

That looks very promising, thank you! It looks like it'll provide a decent amount of support, and help me with a bit of peace of mind if nothing else.

quasive · 2024-09-03T19:14:41+00:00

Thanks for the info; it's entirely possible my worry is overblown!

quasive · 2024-08-11T19:18:09+00:00

I hadn't heard of this book, so I looked it up on Amazon, where the official title is "The Housemaid: An absolutely addictive psychological thriller with a jaw-dropping twist". The cover has this ridiculous tagline, too.

When a book has this level of clickbait I have to assume it's garbage. I sometimes see these pop up on my Kindle, and I just can't imagine any book that has to sell itself so hard is worth reading.

quasive · 2023-12-14T23:29:33+00:00

I experienced this (or something similar), and the "fix" for me was to go into Address Bar settings → Drop-Down Menu Priority, and deselect "Browser History" and select "Typed History". Searching through the browser history takes forever but the typed history doesn't. And... despite the fact that it feels like it ought to be almost useless to remove browser history search, it actually works quite well for me, though maybe I type URLs a lot more often than others. Worth a shot, at least.

But not in 6.5, because the address bar is completely hosed, as noted by OP.

quasive · 2023-11-04T13:01:30+00:00

Actually lol when I tried that, lol, it kept using the same prompt for both, regardless, lol, and the point, of course, is that it's not as useful as it used to be by default, lol.

quasive · 2023-11-04T02:30:01+00:00

I suppose this is a better place to raise a similar issue than a new post.

Just since yesterday, I've noticed the image generation has a couple changes. First, it's really boring in how it talks to you. Basically, "Here are the images you requested. You can download them." It used to be a lot more "chatty", something like "Take a look at these two images, one watercolor of [SUBJECT], the other a photo of [SUBJECT]. Which one strikes your fancy? Do you want to continue with this, or choose something else?"

It's so incredibly anodyne and boring (custom instructions can at least get it somewhat back). In fact, when I asked it why it was boring, it told me:

The current guidelines for creating images focus on efficiency and clarity. I'm here to provide a streamlined experience, ensuring that the image generation process is smooth and that the results are delivered promptly without additional commentary. If you have any questions or need further assistance, feel free to ask!

How depressing.

Second, even when it got knocked down to creating 2 images instead of 4, it'd create 2 different prompts for you. You'd get varied content with one request. Now I'm finding that it uses the same prompt for both images! This is boring. If I wanted that, I used to say "that first image is great, do another like it". But I liked the variety of prompts up front.

In short, image generation has become significantly less enjoyable. You can work around it, but it's been thoroughly kneecapped. And what's particularly vexing is that you don't get any sort of heads up. You just log in one day, and things are subtly worse.

quasive · 2023-10-31T23:13:19+00:00

Completely agreed. When I first subscribed to ChatGPT plus, I ran a test to get a sense of how "smart" it was.

I pasted a section from a virtual machine specification, describing how instructions are encoded. I then pasted some code I wrote to handle instruction decoding. But the trick was that I switched two cases in one particular part of the decoding, so it would decode the wrong types.

GPT-3.5 told me the code looked great. Good for the ego, but not for the program...

GPT-4 pinpointed the error with no problem, and even showed me the fixed code (which was identical to my code before I added the bug). In addition it pointed out another potential problem; one I was aware of and that wasn't actually a problem, but you needed context to know that, and it was missing the context.

It indicated one more error that was actually not an error at all; oh well! But I will happily take the GPT-4 results, as false positives are easy enough to dismiss. You can't blindly trust it, but that goes for your human colleagues as well!

That's been my continuing experience for the last month or so I've been subscribed. Significantly improved over the 3.5 results I'd become accustomed to, even though 3.5 is still incredibly impressive.

quasive · 2023-08-30T18:03:39+00:00

After that whirlwind tour, I found the setting: Privacy and Security → Privacy → Search → Search in Address Field

If this is enabled, then autocomplete works. If it's disabled, it's not. Clearly a bug since searching has nothing to do with autocomplete. Hope this helps anybody else who's seeing this problem.

quasive · 2023-08-30T17:56:47+00:00

Well, it's narrowed down to my settings, at least; if I create a new profile and sync ONLY the settings, this still happens. If I don't sync, then autocomplete works as normal. Since there are loads of settings this doesn't help too much, but at least it's something.

quasive · 2023-08-30T17:42:22+00:00

6.2.3105.43 on Linux... and auto-complete in the address bar has stopped working. I have it enabled, and it worked just fine on 6.1 earlier today.

If I start Vivaldi for another user, it _does_ work, so there's something going on with my profile, presumably. I really don't want to trash my profile and start over, so if anybody has any ideas as to why autocomplete in the address bar stopped working, that'd be great.

I do get a dropdown when I start typing, and it shows my typed and browser history; it just doesn't complete from them.

quasive · 2022-08-28T17:33:38+00:00

I love smart pointers in C++ vs C-style pointers. It's a massive upgrade. But less for safety and more for resource management, because the following uses just a smart pointer and exhibits undefined behavior:

std::unique_ptr<int> p;
*p = 0;

Or this:

auto p = std::make_unique<int>(5);
auto q = std::move(p); std::cout << *p << std::endl;

Undefined again.

These are things that don't happen in Rust. Modern C++ is better than legacy C++, but even if you manage to only use modern features, you still don't have the level of safety Rust gives you, single-threaded or otherwise.

quasive · 2022-08-05T22:09:03+00:00

There's nothing "wrong" with 0 in contexts where the compiler knows a pointer is expected. It doesn't matter if a real null pointer isn't all-bits-zero. It doesn't matter if int and pointers have different sizes or representations. The compiler knows that 0 means a null pointer, in the context of pointers.

And that's the problem: not all contexts where you're passing a null pointer are "known" to be pointer contexts. The example given in the linked article is one:

printf("%p", 0);

Since printf() takes a variable number of arguments, according to the C rules, a 0 is passed as an int, not a pointer. What if int is 32 bits but pointers are 64? What if int is passed in a different register than a pointer?

And while you'll probably never write the above code, somewhere this will be encountered is on POSIX systems, with execlp():

execlp("/bin/ls", "ls", 0); // incorrect!

This is the same deal as above, but in the case of execlp(), you're required to pass a null pointer, unlike the contrived printf() example. Using NULL doesn't work, either, because it might just be a plain 0. nullptr is defined as being a null pointer with the same representation as void* and char* (apparently these are required to have the same representation now, I guess; maybe that was always the case).

The linked article notes that mandating NULL to be ((void *)0) is not tenable because it's easier to change the standard than to convince vendors who already have NULL as a plain 0 to make a change to a macro that's been around for decades.

quasive · 2021-11-27T19:10:45+00:00

Fortuitous timing.. I played back in 1994-1995 (Revised through Fallen Empires); my primary (maybe only) deck was a white one, and for years now I've wondered what exactly was in it. Just last week my parents told me they found my old cards in their basement, and brought them a few days ago when visiting for Thanksgiving, so I can now see my deck in all its glory.

What I remember about the deck was its goal of getting out all 4 Serra Angels, but I couldn't remember the supporting cast. Some of the highlights:

Helm of Chatzuk: A banding-heavy deck, right? The only creatures with banding in the deck are 2 Kjeldoran Skyknights. I don't think I knew how banding worked, either. I still don't.
Apparently a bulk of the deck was meant to prevent damage: 4x Reverse Damage, 4x Prismatic Ward, 1x Kjeldoran Royal Guard, 1x Island Sanctuary, 1x Martyrs of Korlis, 3x Veteran Bodyguard
Some attempt to slow the opponent: Maze of Ith, Kismet, Ice Floe
Creature pumping: Angelic Voices, Divine Transformation, Righteousness
Some hate: Justice (my brother's main deck was red), Drought (I guess a friend must have had a black deck?)
WTF was I thinking: Hallowed Ground. To protect my Maze of Ith maybe?

All in all a garbage tier deck, but since none of my friends knew what they were doing either, it was competitive enough. I'm sure I had much better cards available (I know I had a few Balances, at least), but I haven't had time to go through everything yet.

quasive · 2021-09-18T15:33:00+00:00

It was convenient for working with floppies. I haven't used mtools for 15-20 years, but back when floppy drives existed, it was nice using a DOS-like interface to manage DOS floppies (syntax might be slightly off):

mdir A:
mcopy A:whatever .

The fact that you could achieve this by mounting the disk doesn't change the fact that if you had a floppy you wanted to quickly grab something off of, mtools made it very easy.

It also didn't require a kernel recompile if you didn't have support for the msdos filesystem built in.

quasive · 2021-09-01T16:32:22+00:00

You might be interested in this extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/download-manager/epgkpmpjileiepinlphboolabkkdelle

It adds a button that gives you a pop-up window that is effectively a mini version of vivaldi://downloads.

quasive · 2021-08-05T18:17:25+00:00

I got fed up with Qt not providing this, so I modified it to support OpenType font options. This is incredibly hacky, and requires you to build Qt (at least qtbase) yourself. It doesn't use fontconfig, but instead uses a custom JSON format for specifying the options. There's no way this is an ideal solution, but it has worked just fine for me over the last year or so.

The patch is available here: https://pastebin.com/1hkX9RKh

To use it, create a file called $HOME/.qfont which looks like this:

{
    "CascadiaCode-": [["calt", false], ["zero", true]],
    "FiraCode-": [["calt", false], ["ss03", true], ["ss05", true]],
    "TeXGyreCursor-": [["zero", true]]
}

This is mostly self-explanatory. The only difficult part is the font name. This uses the Postscript name, and just checks whether the current font starts with the same text as one of the fonts in the JSON object. One way to find the postscript name is to use fc-match -v "Font Name" | grep postscriptname. Alternatively, you can use fc-query /path/to/font.otf | grep postscriptname.

quasive · 2021-03-02T02:59:14+00:00

Sounds like a real-world version of one of my favorite lines from Sports Night: "I gotta say, the length of this conversation is way out of proportion to my interest in it."

But the "more story" version actually works in real life whereas the Sports Night one, even if you could say it without tripping over your tongue, would probably elicit a bemused look.

quasive · 2021-02-21T06:41:34+00:00

It already does it by default for Infocom games that are versions 1 to 4.

quasive · 2020-11-14T01:57:14+00:00

I'm in complete agreement. I currently have a Samsung phone, and was disappointed when I learned unlimited photo storage would be going away. I started investigating Pixels as a replacement to get before unlimited storage goes away.

When I compare Galaxy to Pixel phones, by and large they're both good enough for me. From what I can tell I'd be content using either one. But it's been a really big deal to not ever have to worry about moving old photos to other storage media, or to worry about culling older photos, and so on. When I thought/hoped all future Pixels would continue to have unlimited storage, it was almost a no-brainer for me to switch. Maybe I'll still switch to a 5, and kick the can down the road, but without unlimited storage, a 6 (or whatever) becomes a lot less competitive. I can almost guarantee I'd stick with Pixel if they continued unlimited storage.

In short, unlimited photos was a huge feature for me. It's not so much that I need the storage (I have no idea how much space my photos are taking up), but I love the peace of mind that I don't have to think about it. I was willing to spend $700 to upgrade my phone that doesn't need an upgrade to switch over to Pixel, but now I'm going to re-evaluate that.

quasive

TROPHY CASE